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The Great Unraveling

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Posted: February 25th, 2016

By Michael Singh

Michael Singh is the Lane-Swig Senior Fellow and managing director at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.

In the past five years, the Middle East has suffered from a double collapse. 

First, having proven unable to provide capable political institutions or economic opportunity to their citizens, several of the region’s states have effectively collapsed.  Reconstituting them has proven to be a task of immense difficulty, leading to increased repression and violence in Egypt, the fragmentation of Syria and Iraq along sectarian lines, and anarchy in Libya and Yemen.  The political and economic decay of these states is not a new phenomenon, and was not triggered by the Arab uprisings of 2011.  Rather, that tumult exposed and ultimately exacerbated deep structural problems that were decades in the making.

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